Politics 2.0

The old rules of politicking don't seem to apply anymore. And the new rules have yet to be fully formulated.

Here are a series of quotes from today's New York Times that stitch together an over-the-shoulder look at the 2008 Presidential campaigns.

Link to June 8 New York Times article, "For New Journalists, All Bets, but Not Mikes, Are Off".

Quote:
The woman, Mayhill Fowler, who calls herself a citizen journalist, wore no credential around her neck and did not identify herself, her intentions or her affiliation as an unpaid contributor to Off the Bus, a section of The Huffington Post. While her digital audio recorder was visible in her left hand during that encounter last Monday, she says, she did not believe Mr. Clinton saw it. “I think we can safely say he thought I was a member of the audience,” she said in a telephone interview on Friday.

The incident, widely mined on the cable news channels as fresh evidence of Mr. Clinton’s volcanic temper in the waning hours of his wife’s presidential campaign, has prompted an entirely different discussion — this one among political reporters, journalism teachers, public relations strategists and bloggers themselves — about the dos and don’ts of ethical reporting in the YouTube age.

And then we learn this little tidbit about Bill Clinton here: "The Long Road to a Clinton Exit. Undone by Old Rivalries and a New-Style Opponent".

Quote: Mr. Clinton vented frustrations and, still not one to use e-mail, much less a BlackBerry, [my emphasis] found his famed instincts inadequate in a blogosphere age that amplified every intemperate outburst.

A summary of other comments is found here: "The Wiki-Way to the Nomination".

Quote:
Barack Obama is the victor, and the Internet is taking the bows.

Commenting on the Democratic presidential primary campaign, the blogger Andrew Sullivan praised Mr. Obama’s success in mastering “Facebook politics.” Roger Cohen, writing online [registration required]in The New York Times, likened the rapid success of Mr. Obama to that of a “classic Internet startup.” And The Atlantic Monthly, in a much discussed article titled “HisSpace,” described what Mr. Obama’s impressive online fund-raising apparatus owes to the enhanced social networking of sites like MySpace, Twitter and YouTube.

Here's a prescient article on Politics 2.0 from a January 24, 2007 "Politico" post.

Quote:
...a closer look at the 2006 midterm election reveals that bottom-up political action using the Internet is dramatically altering campaign dynamics.

As we head into 2008, one big question is who will have the upper hand: top-down campaigns that see technology as a tool to better game the existing system or grass-roots activists who have discovered their power to change it.